Haunted
by dharmamonkey
Summary: Booth wakes up in the middle of night haunted by memories of his past, including the worst moments of his tour in Afghanistan.


**Haunted**

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**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rating:** T  
**Disclaimer:** I don't own Bones. I am, however, interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply.

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**A/N: ** _Props to _**Labsquint **_for helping me brainstorm the idea that became this little story._

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I have done a lot of things in my life that I'm not proud of.

I've done a lot of things that I wish I could undo. I suppose we all feel that way, you know, from time to time. I try not to think about it too much.

Every day, I wake up and, before I ever leave the house, make sure my beautiful daughter and my amazing partner know how much I love them. Even though he's an ocean away, I talk to my son twice a week via Skype and make sure he, too, knows how much I love him and how proud of him I am.

There are only a handful of things in my life that I really, really regret doing—things that creep up on me in the middle of the night and yank me out of sleep, only to leave me so cranked up and agitated that the only thing that gets me to sleep again is a Xanax and a couple of Benadryl. I knock out my buzzing brain with a bit of pharmaceutical ingenuity and manage to scrounge up a few more hours of sleep, then the alarm goes off and somehow, between a cold shower and a large Dunkin Donuts coffee with one cream and two sugars, I'm able to drag my sorry ass out of the house and over to the Hoover to make something of myself that day.

Some nights, though, not even a Xanax and a doubleshot of Benadryl are enough to catapult me back to the featureless landscape of dreamless slumber, and those nights—those—are the worst.

You know, it's strange, I guess. Of all the shit that I've been though, between getting the shit kicked out of me by my abusive, alcoholic father, being tortured as a POW when I was in Iraq and later by a hillbilly West Virginia mobster, or having taken as many lives as I have as a soldier and later as a cop, that's not what really keeps me up in the middle of the night.

_No._

What haunts my dreams and wakes me up in the wee hours of the night are the decisions I've made, or not made, that hurt people or got them killed. It's the things I've done that I could have done differently and that, had I done them differently, would have meant that the people who got hurt or killed wouldn't have. For all the men whose lives I've taken, the blood that stains my hands the most—the blood I can't seem to wash off, no matter how many times I pray the rosary and beg forgiveness for the things I've done, no matter now many murderers I put away, no matter how many lives I save, no matter how many sick kids I work with as a volunteer at the neurofibromatosis unit at Children's National—is the blood that was shed unnecessarily because I messed up, and the people who suffered because of it.

Teddy Parker died the night after our unit, the 187th Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne, crossed into Iraq. He died because I let him down. I should have known by the restless, twitchy way he was acting behind the spotter's scope that he was out of sorts, and I should have done something to call him out on it, to knock some sense into him so he'd pull himself together. It's what partners do, right? Partners look out for one another, and help each other stay on their game when the shit gets real, but when the shit got real for me and Teddy on the south side of that _wadi _on the outskirts of Al-Khidhir, I was so focused on pulling off the mission—dropping that Iraqi sniper—that I didn't realize he was shifting around next to me and popping up over the protective defilade we'd found for ourselves until I heard the _fwip _sound of the bullet pass through him and the gasp of surprise when the pain hit him. I should have realized it. I should have known better. I let him down. I fucking let him down, and he's dead because of it.

Hank Luttrell says it's not my fault, that shit happens in war and that I shouldn't blame myself for Teddy's death. I know what he's saying, and maybe he's right, but it's really hard to feel the kind of peace my silvery-haired old friend is trying to talk to me about when I'm looking across the table at him in the wheelchair that he's in because he got shot in the back in Kosovo when his men—the junior enlisted men that I, the senior non-commissioned officer for our Ranger company, had been responsible for training—got surprised by a Serb patrol during a mission. Hank hasn't walked in twenty years, and it's because my guys weren't as sharp as they should have been.

I take a deep breath and turn my head to look at the beautiful woman laying next to me, her gorgeous, soul-swallowing eyes hidden beneath silky eyelids which are still tinted with a light dusting of eyeshadow. The three months we spent apart are a relatively fresh wound, just barely scabbed over, and I still feel the memory of the way her absence left a gaping hole in my heart. The pain of being apart from her and my wonderful little baby girl is all that much more bruising when I think how maybe all that misery could've been avoided had I not blew my lid and beat the crap out of Pelant when I went to see him.

She murmurs in her sleep and rolls over, and her arm, which has been draped over my hip for the last twenty-five minutes—I know because I've been laying here, alternating between staring at the ceiling and staring at the green glowing numbers on the alarm clock, for the last two and a half hours—pulls away.

I thought tonight was going to be okay and that I'd manage to get a decent night of sleep. Bones got home late, exhausted after a long night spent reassembling a shattered skull belonging to the victim whose death is our new case, but she came home around eight and we had a nice dinner of leftover lasagna, then watched a little TV before we went upstairs. We made love—that slow, sweet, gentle sort of lovemaking that follows on the heels of a long, tiring day but ends with a just-let-me-die-now kind of bliss that reminds you how lucky you are to have the other person to be a refuge from the crazy, cruel world—and we both fell asleep soon after.

But I woke up around three, my heartbeat throbbing in my ears and wheezing as I found myself dragged into a cascading memory that nothing—not the sound of our daughter on the baby monitor or the soft murmur of my partner's quiet little snores next to me or the way the soft, warm skin of her bare bottom felt against mine as we lay there, cheek to cheek—seemed to shake loose.

It was the worst of all of them, this memory, and I knew the second I blinked my eyes open and saw the alarm clock staring back at me..._3:03_...that I probably wouldn't be able to fall back asleep. It didn't matter whether my eyes were open or closed, but I couldn't get the memory out of my head once it had dug its claws into my thoughts. It wasn't just images or even sounds: the memory was so vivid I could almost feel the sand on my chin, chafing underneath the chin strap of my Kevlar helmet.

See, as it turned out, my seven-month stint in Afghanistan coincided with a big joint NATO-Afghan offensive in Helmand Province called Operation Moshtarak. The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) deployed 15,000 Afghan, American and British troops to push the Taliban out of Marjah, a key town in the middle of Afghanistan's major poppy-producing regions, and install an ISAF-friendly _jirga _(council of tribal elders) to govern the newly-liberated area.

We'd been looking for this guy, Mahmoud Ghafoor, and we were pretty sure he was still in the Marjah district, but despite a week of combing the area for him, he'd eluded us in a frustrating game of cat and mouse (_pisho aw maj'ak _in Pashto, I was told by my Afghan men). Finally, we got a tip that he was in a tea house adjacent to a bazaar. I went out with two five-man teams of Afghan National Army soldiers, and we converged on the tea house, only to find that Ghafoor had slipped away just moments before we got there—presumably tipped off by a sympathetic shopkeeper who sent a runner to the tea house to tell him we were on the move. One of the ANAs spotted him duck into the alley that separated the commercial block where the tea house was from the bazaar complex.

I sent half my ANAs with their squad leader Nasim into the bazaar while I ran with the other five ANAs to flank the opposite end, hoping to cut him off before he made his way into the adjacent block of homes, which areas always made us a bit leery because the residents of Marjah have always resented the presence of western-led troops in their town far more than the Taliban insurgents who'd been operating out of there for years. Ghafoor proved to be quick on his feet, because after a couple of minutes, it was clear that he'd exited the bazaar before my squad got to the other side of it. We were left with no other choice than to do a house-to-house search.

We'd cleared three houses before we got to the fourth, a mud-brick structure like all the others, with cut-out windows covered with hand-loomed draperies instead of glass, and as we approached it, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Something was off about this house. I knew it in my gut. It was four o'clock in the afternoon. There should have been some sound in that house, but it was quiet—too quiet. I felt butterflies in my belly as I stood there, my finger held fast to the side of my rifle's action as I listened. We heard a few seconds of shuffling inside and a weird sound, a faint squeak and a warble, but then silence again. Something didn't seem right about this house, but I couldn't figure out what it was. My Spidey-sense was tingling as I stood there, my back pressed against the wall as I pulled out an M67 fragmentation grenade and wrapped my fingers around the spoon as I yanked the pin, signaling to the five ANAs to be ready to charge through the weathered old wooden door as soon as they heard the blast. I gave a _three-two-one _hand signal and tossed the grenade through the window, turning away from the window as I waited four, almost five seconds for the grenade to detonate.

As soon as we heard the blast, two of the ANAs kicked the door in and I filed in first, with the other three ANAs following right behind me. It took a second for my eyes to adjust to the dim light of the room as the smoke cleared and I swept my rifle from one wall to the other as I scanned the room. I heard shouting in Pashto and then the sound of an M16 firing in the back room of the house as one of the ANAs squeezed off a few rounds, then the tell-tale clinks of empty brass hitting the floor and more shouting. I glanced towards the doorway at the back of the house and saw the ANA corporal give the all-clear signal.

That's when I saw her.

She was laying face down on the carpet, which was stained with blood. I waved to one of the ANAs to come as I knelt down and gently rolled her over. Her headscarf was shredded and fell onto the carpet beneath her. Her face was sliced up and bloodied, with a big gash in her cheek and one of her ears barely hanging on. One of her eye sockets was so torn up and bloody I couldn't tell if there was even an eye still there, and the other one was half open but still as glass. My heart was pounding in my chest as I reached around and checked her pulse.

Nothing.

I frowned and checked again, pressing harder against her neck where her pulse should have vibrated against my fingertips, but still felt nothing. She was young, maybe eleven or twelve years old as best I could tell—the same age as Parker—and the one eye I could see was the same warm brown color as my son's.

_Oh God, _I thought. _What have I done?_

The ANA guy said something in Pashto that I didn't understand, but my ears were roaring and my head was spinning, so I probably wouldn't have been able to hear anything even if I'd had a better grip on the language. I pulled my hand away and stared down at her face and chest, which were burned, bloody and peppered with shards of steel from the grenade.

_My _grenade.

I looked down at my hand and saw my fingers streaked with blood.

Laying on my side as the clock blinks back at me—_3:06_—I turn my hand and look at my fingers. It's too dark in the room to see but I swear I can feel the tacky feeling of drying blood in the webbing between my fingers as my skin tingles with a creepy-crawly sensation. I hear Bones smack her lips together again and make a humming sound low in her throat as the mattress shifts a little and that's when I feel it hit me, a big black wave of regret washing over me.

Because I remember.

That's when it all began to fall apart for me over there.

After that mission to get Ghafoor, and what happened in that house by the bazaar in Marjah, I felt a hole open up inside of me. Maybe that hole was already there, a little tiny hole, but what happened in that house, to that little girl, and knowing that she'd died on my account, tore that hole wide open and I felt like my soul itself was hemorrhaging. I felt stained and lost, empty and unredeemable, worthless and unlovable. No wonder my partner didn't write me letters, I thought. I didn't deserve love. So a few weeks later, when we were staking out the same tea house where we'd tried to nab Ghafoor and a bouncy blonde journalist stuck her snoot where it—and she—shouldn't have been, I was weak enough, battered and beaten down on the inside, that I didn't resist her advances. I felt unwantable, yet she wanted me. I wanted to be wanted. I wanted someone to tell me I wasn't the worthless sack I felt like. So I let her love me, and grabbed onto that love like a life-line, and I tried to love her back. I know now that I didn't really fall in love with her, but rather with the idea of her, and that being with her and letting her follow me back to the States and all the carrying on we did wounded the woman I really loved—the woman I'd always loved, even when she told me she couldn't love me and I told her I had to move on. I know how much pain I caused both of them, and how I can't unwind any of that.

I hear her murmur in her sleep again and can feel a tight knot in the bit of my stomach as I think of what happened in the waning months of 2010. It haunts me—the pain I caused her—just like any of the other times I did or didn't do something that hurt someone.

I've made so many mistakes, and while I manage to carry on, day after day, and try not to think about the things I've done, sometimes, in the middle of the night, the things I've done crawl out of the dark little corners of my memory to haunt me. And when that happens, there's only one thing that really makes the pain bearable.

_Her._

I turn away from the clock with its snide, menacing digits—_3:08_—and roll over, sliding across the slick sheets to curl up behind her, tucking my thighs against hers, snuggling my crotch behind her ass, and slipping my arm around her waist as she mumbles something into her pillow that I can't quite make out.

I close my eyes and try to let go of every thought that races through my mind. I try to push all those thoughts away and think only of one thing and one thing only: the way the smooth, silky skin of her back feels against my chest.

I press a soft kiss against the back of her shoulder and let my lips linger there as I breathe in a noseful of her scent, then kiss her again as a small shiver passes through me.

Nuzzling into her shoulder, I feel my breath warm against her skin as I wait for sleep to come.

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**A/N: **_The angst muse bubbled this one up. I hope you liked it._

_Don't leave me guessing. Please, share your thoughts as I've shared mine. Let me know what you think. Consider leaving a review._

_Thanks for reading._


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